6 minute read
Criticism: Genna Rivieccio
Maternal Paranoia & Boris Vian’s Heartsnatcher
Mothers. Can’t live with them and literally can’t live without them. This is the primary point driven home by one of Boris Vian’s more under appreciated works, Heartsnatcher. While his unique brand of magical realism was most concretely established with L’Écume des Jours (Froth on the Daydream)—which would later become all shiny and new again when Michel Gondry adapted it into 2013’s Mood Indigo—it is Heartsnatcher that takes the most liberties with the blurred line between reality and fantasy. As Vian’s final novel published in 1953, L’Arrache-coeur, as it was named in its original language, explores
Genna Rivieccio
the strange travails of a psychotherapist named Timortis who seems to have actually been born yesterday upon first encountering Clementine and Angel, a married couple in the process of delivering “a pair of twins, and one on his own... He arrived very definitely a moment or two after the others. It’s the sign of a strong personality.” So begins Vian’s undercutting, scathing account of what it means to be a mother. Setting the scene that Timortis happens upon, Vian writes, “The mother was lying on the bed, suffering the hundred and thirteen pangs of childbirth.” It’s immediately clear that Clementine serves as the representation of the
horrendous dichotomy all mothers must endure: loving their children more than anything else, while also despising them to their very core for taking away what was once theirs— their body. But even more than resenting her newborn trio, bizarrely named Alfa Romeo (the one with the “strong personality,” obviously), Joel and Noel, Clementine loathes her husband for what he has done to her. So livid is she with him, in fact, that she’ll only allow Timortis into the room to help deliver the baby. With a tinge of irony, Timortis remarks, “This sort of thing isn’t at all the right kind of job for a psychiatrist...” But, of course, the second the parentchild relationship—specifically the mother-son kind—is established, a need for a psychiatric professional is imminent. Once Clementine has accepted her eternal fate as mother, she transcends into a hyper-protective mode, bordering on caricature. The guilt and self-flagellation that comes with not being good enough to care
for the fruit of her loins, as it were, is a constant source of anxiety and paranoia. For instance, when her three children essentially rebel against her by breaking in to their own food supply before “feeding time,” Clementine has a near panic attack. Vian describes, “Thinking that she had once more let the time for their
feed go by, Clementine was filled with shame and remorse, even fiercer than the annoyance she felt when she happened to arrive home late. Even Alfa Romeo’s defiantly provocative attitude completed the way his brothers had reacted. Standing up for himself and for what he was doing he had the feeling, as they did, of having brought off something forbidden. He obviously imagined that his mother was punishing all three of them, that she didn’t want them to have their feed.” The beginnings of the natural insubordination that comes with being a child discovering one’s own will takes a heavy toll on Clementine, who sees it as an insult to her parenting. And then, of course, there is the martyrdom that goes hand in hand with motherhood as well. The requisite “After all I’ve done for you, this is how you repay me” philosophy. Accordingly, Vian paints the portrait of Clementine’s life as extremely self-sacrificing. Putting the needs of her spawn before her own, Vian emphasizes this sense of self-imposed sainthood by noting, “Clementine felt hungry. She no longer ate anything herself at lunchtimes as she was so busy fussing around and feeding her three growing boys.” Relishing the few personal moments she has to herself, those spent in blissful quiet and solitude, are punctuated by behvior that would be considered taboo to engage in while in front of her children. For example, Clementine decides to enjoy eating by “savoring each minute as it passed.” Elsewhere, signs of esoteric comportment reveal themselves in the way Clementine still wants to see herself as a sexual creature. Taking the opportunity to size herself up in the absence of her kids, “She went to see if her bedroom was closed and turned the key in the lock. All quiet. Nobody likely to come in. She went back to the middle of the room and lightly loosened the belt of her cotton dress. She looked at herself modestly in the wardrobe mirror.” Possessed by an undeniable melancholy over what she sees, the latent ill will she has toward Alfa Romeo, Noel and Joel bubbles to the surface at the most unlikely of instants. And yet, this bitterness is quelled by the innate desire she has to worry over her children. The number of concerns on Clementine’s hyperbolic list of potential terrible things that can happen to her sons intensifies when she realizes, “I don’t know where Noel and Joel—or Alfa Romeo—can be. At this very moment they might be falling into the well, or eating poisoned fruit, or getting arrows in their eyes if some village child is playing with a cross-bow on the road, or catching tuberculosis if one of Koch’s bacilli should come this way, or going into a trance through breathing some over-scented flowers, or getting themselves stung by a scorpion brought back by one of the village children’s grandfathers...” This distorted amplification of Clementine and her irrational fears is, however, in keeping with the tongue-in-cheek tone of Heartsnatcher. As the novel progresses, Timortis’ rehashings of the goings-on in the village become more absurd, accented by the fact that he’s dating his entries with made up time frames like “107 Apirgust.” At a certain point, Clementine’s full-tilt obsession with child-rearing signals Angel going off on his own to build a sailboat, with Timortis left as a sort of casual inbetween. This suits Timortis fine, though, as it serves his aim to steal people’s feelings (since he has none of his own) by psychoanlyzing them. Ultimately, the only regular client he can secure regular “sessions” with is Clementine’s servant, who prefers to expose her naked body for sex rather than her naked emotions for examination. Thus, Timortis finds himself primarily at Clementine’s beck and call, willing to serve as her aide and confidante in all matters pertaining to her children. When he isn’t stumbling upon barbaric village customs like auctioning off old people in the fashion of slavery or the local priest being stoned in order to invoke rainfall, he is involved in Clementine’s overzealous episodes of mothering. As the plot grows more and more incongruous the closer it approaches to the conclusion, Timortis poses the question to Clementine, “Well, do they really need all this protection?” From there, the dialogue escalates into a probing of the disturbed nature of Clementine’s (and a majority of mothers in general) obsession with her children. Timortis tries to make her see reason by warning her that, metaphorically speaking, “birds die in cages.” Clementine illogically argues his every point, spouting such isms as “Only a mother could understand me” and “I think I’m in a better position than anybody else to judge what’s good for them.” To this, Timortis balks, “Not quite... They
themselves are in a better position than you are.” And yet, when trapped behind the tunnel visioned lens of matriarchy, it appears as though many a mother—Clementine being one of the most extreme versions— gets caught in the trap of wanting to make not just their children their entire world, but be the entire world to their children. As Clementine disgustingly asserts to Timortis as he bids his adieu to her and her child-oppressing ways, “Me and my children are of one flesh.” It is with this line that Vian most acutely stresses the toxic turn a mother can take when she becomes overly safeguarding of her children. And while Heartsnatcher may be intended as a hyper-surreal narrative, the world abounds with this genre of “creator.”
